French not quite the mustard

If a man had dared write this distasteful snigger of a comedy about the despair of a deserted wife he would have been accused of belittling and mocking the marriage pains of the opposite sex.

But the author of My Brilliant Divorce, Geraldine Aron, is a fullyfledged female playwright. So some people may relish Aron's crudity, her silly satire and attempts to raise laughs at the expense of a middle-aged wife who is left in the lurch and duly lurches in the direction of despair, dildoes and the doctor.

Dawn French, dressed in a kaftan and slacks, and frequently wearing a misguided expression of bovine blankness, makes comic light of the desolation of her character, Angela, a part-time window dresser with an absent daughter. Miss French, who's a forceful, chirpy performer with a flare for self-deprecation, revels in silly walks and rather grotesque gestures in Garry Hynes's monochrome production. She sends up Angela as often as she can. And since the play sentences us to 85 minutes alone with her and a blow-by-blow account of how it feels to be beaten by misfortune, Dawn's monologue comes to seem like a very long day's journey into night. It is her fans, of whom a big, appreciative claque was out in force last night, who will be amused.

I do not suggest that playwrights have to treat marital separation and divorce in grave, humourless fashion. Long before Feydeau wrote farces about adulterers fearful of being caught with their trousers down or their petticoats up, fornication was the source of valuable theatrical fun. But Aron's Angela is a disappointingly contrived combination of stand-up comedienne with broad laugh-lines and lost soul at large. Miss French looms voluminous on Francis O'Connor's bare, anonymous stage-set, with just a toy dog for company, and launches into a stream and scream of consciousness story of her marital break-down, her loneliness and attempted reconciliation.

It's the familiar story of an unaware wife and painful discovery, with a husband named Roundhead who has been having it away - with a girl to whom he defects. Miss French, who is at home with flippancy and all at sea with seriousness, revels in scenes of basic, situation comedy. A lonely hearts advert leads to a strange meeting: "The man in the distance was tiny and as he got closer he didn't get any bigger."

A Samaritan help-line adviser is wildly unhelpful, suggesting she drown her troubles by helping out in a geriatric ward. A psychiatrist proves crazy and when a one-night stand brings no satisfaction she resorts to a sex-shop, dildoes and a video called Titty, Titty, Bang-Bang. The opportunity for scathing satire about shrinks and sex problems is quite lost in a welter of old cracks.

Miss French's Angela remains the spirited, longsuffering butt of her author's poor jokes, the mocked middl e - a ged woman for whom none of the men on the loose have any real use. And when away on a Welsh weekend the romance that beckons beggars belief.

This performer is at her natural, perennially popular best as a comic turn rather than an actress. Her performance, for all its limitations is an impressive feat of memory, resilience and force of personality. But as a spurned wife Miss French is a bit of a joke.